I just finished reading one of the best books on the
Pentagon and U.S. foreign policy that I have ever
read. The title of the book is House of War: The
Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power by
James Carroll, the longtime columnist at the Boston
Globe. The book was published in 2007 but I didn't
discover it until just recently.

The book is a deeply profound and moving account of
the disastrous role that the Pentagon has played in
American life. That, of course, would come as a
shocking notion to most Americans, who have been
inculcated with the belief that the Pentagon and its
vast military establishment are essential to the
security of the nation and the freedom of the American
people. Actually, as Carroll carefully documents in
this 600-page book, it's the exact opposite.

The book begins with the ground-breaking for the
Pentagon, which took place in 1941, even before Japan
had attacked at Pearl Harbor. Then, proceeding into
World War II, Carroll dares to go where others fear to
tread — the Pentagon's intentional targeting of
civilians with fire-bombings in Germany and Japan,
followed by the atomic bombings on the civilians of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, Carroll argues, was
totally unnecessary given that Japan was on the verge
of surrendering anyway.

The problem, Carroll points out, was that President
Roosevelt had previously issued his "unconditional
surrender" demand, which unnecessarily prolonged the
war against both Germany and Japan, given that such a
demand implied the right to do whatever the victorious
side wanted to do to the German and Japanese people.
The Soviet Union's policy of encouraging its soldiers
to rape German women comes to mind.

Every indication is that the Japanese were ready to
surrender if they could be guaranteed that their
emperor would be treated well. But unconditional meant
unconditional. Never mind that the United States ended
up treating the emperor well anyway after Japan
surrendered in the face of the two atomic bombings. As
Carroll suggests, the real purpose of the atomic
bombings was to serve as a message to the Soviet
Union.

After the war, the Pentagon didn't shut down. Instead,
it simply geared up to fight a new war—this one
against its World War II partner and ally the Soviet
Union. The Pentagon did everything it could to
generate a Cold War that would necessarily entail a
vast permanent military establishment and
ever-increasing military budgets.

But after losing more than 20 million people in World
War II, not to mention the destruction of most of the
country, the last thing the Soviet Union wanted was to
get involved in another war, especially against a
nation that had not suffered the ravages of war on its
own soil and, more important, one that showed that it
was more than willing to drop nuclear bombs on enemy
cities.

By the time President Eisenhower was leaving office,
he had come to recognize the dangers of this vast
military-industrial complex, as he labeled it. It was
a grave danger to America's democratic way of life, he
pointed in his Farewell Address. And it was changing
the spirit of America, causing the nation to resort to
many of the dark-side practices of the communist
regimes that the Pentagon was confronting.

Carroll points out that while President Kennedy had
come into office as a standard Cold Warrior, the Cuban
Missile Crisis seared him, given that the world had
come so close to total nuclear destruction. Kennedy
decided to embark on a path leading to the end of the
Cold War, believing that it was entirely possible for
the Soviet people and American people to coexist in
peace, much like the United States does today with
China and Vietnam.

Carroll describes Kennedy's famous Peace Speech at
American University, a speech that was broadcast all
across the Soviet Union. That was followed by a
nuclear test ban entered into between the nations.
There was Kennedy's intention to withdraw all U.S.
troops from Vietnam. There was his deep mistrust of
the Pentagon and his famous vow to tear the CIA into a
thousand pieces after the Bay of Pigs disaster and his
firing of CIA Director Allen Dulles. There were also
the secret negotiations between Kennedy and Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev to bring an end to
hostilities, negotiations that Kennedy chose to keep
secret from both the Pentagon and the CIA, something
that Carroll inexplicably doesn't point out.

But the Pentagon would have nothing to do with
Kennedy's efforts to end the Cold War. In the minds of
military officials like Gen. Curtis LeMay, who favored
a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union,
communists could never be trusted. As far as U.S.
military officials were concerned, the communists were
simply lulling Kennedy into complacency so that they
could destroy America with a first-strike nuclear
attack. Of course, the Pentagon knew that if Kennedy
succeeded in bringing an end to the Cold War, there
would no longer be any need for the Pentagon, the
military-industrial complex, and the national-security
apparatus that had been brought into existence in
1947.

With Kennedy's assassination, the efforts to bring the
Cold War to an end came to a screeching halt. Lyndon
Johnson reversed Kennedy's pro-peace policies and gave
the Pentagon the war it wanted in Vietnam. The rest,
as they say, is history.

Of particular interest is Carroll's description of how
close U.S. presidents and the Pentagon have brought
the world to nuclear destruction. I had always thought
that it only got close during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Carroll tells about other instances of where
nuclear war almost occurred, owing to reckless conduct
on the part of the president and the Pentagon.

Once the Cold War was over, there were many who
expected a dismantling or at least a major reduction
in the size of the Cold War military machine. Alas, it
was not to be. Owing to the Persian Gulf War and then
later the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon, along with its
legions of suppliers and contractors, has prospered
beyond anyone's wildest imaginations back in 1941,
notwithstanding the major role it has played in
generating the very threats it purports to protect us
from.

What also makes Carroll's book so fascinating is that
his father was a 3-star general in the Pentagon during
the 1960s, when Carroll was growing up, and the first
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In fact,
as Carroll's views evolved into opposing the Vietnam
War and what the Pentagon stood for, he became
estranged from his father.

This is a long book but it is worth reading for anyone
concerned about moving our nation in a better, freer,
more peaceful direction, one that isn't consumed by
militarism, invasions, occupations, wars of
aggression, sanctions, embargoes, empire,
regime-change operations, support of foreign
dictatorships, and foreign empire and interventionism.
In fact, despite the darkness of the entire "war on
terrorism" paradigm that has held our nation in its
grip since 9/11, Carroll offers hope in the form of
the power of ideas on liberty to bring major changes
in the direction of national and world events.

Here's a link to the press release for the book.

Here are two reviews of the book:

"A Personal Perspective on U.S. Military Might" by
Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune

"How They Learned to Love the Bomb" by John Freeman in
Newsday

The following are endorsements on the dust jacket of
the book:

"A passionately persuasive, thoroughly researched
indictment of this nation's defense and foreign policy
since World War II."—Miami Herald

"Learned, intelligent and thoroughly researched, House
of War should be read and taken seriously by those who
will disagree with its argument and who are too sure
of the righteousness of their views. One can't help
wishing at the same time that Carroll were a little
less sure of the righteousness of his."—New York Times

"Carroll draws a clear and deadly arc from the bombs
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the vengeance-ridden
policies of today. His prose is elegant, his viewpoint
bold."—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of
the United States

"Carroll's most fascinating stories involve moments as
in the Berlin crisis and the Vietnam War when
civilians successfully opposed the Pentagon's
monolithic power."—The New Yorker

"Synthesizing a great deal of information, Carroll has
given us a blueprint of America's most powerful
building — not the White House, but a place where the
true will to power lives in this country."—Newsday

"[The] unique blend of historical perspective set in a
personal frame makes House of War a powerful
narrative."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"House of War is a prodigious historical synthesis
with pressing importance for our times and also a
deeply engaging story. I read it with fascination,
consternation, and at times horror, and found it hard
to pull away even at the end." –Tracy Kidder, author
my My Detachment: A Memoir

"There is only one writer in America with the
historical depth, elegance of style, and moral
complexity to have taken the full measure of this most
central of American institutions. That he was in some
deep sense also an insider—that he ran in the halls of
the Pentagon as a young boy—only makes the match more
perfect, the story more staggering."—Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature

"The many Americans who trust the Pentagon, who
cherish patriotism, piety, and the martial virtues,
must be persuaded—not to distrust the Pentagon but to
bring it more into line with those values, as well as
with other, secular and liberal values … Few
Americans, I'm afraid, will be persuaded by
simplistic, angry leftism. But a great many Americans
will, I predict, be persuaded and moved by James
Carroll's splendid House of War."—George Scialabba,
Virginia Quarterly Review

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The
Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised
in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics
from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree
from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney
for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct
professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the
practice of law to become director of programs at the
Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced
freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all
across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto
and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a
regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at
LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.